Prototypes

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Today it is 10 years since the first pre-alpha of “Whispers in Akarra” was released. Back then I was building the game on my own, but the project was shortly discovered by Kinten and thewreck, and the three of us are now the core of Oxeye Game Studio. I think I always will look back at this game with fondness. It may not have been the best game in the world, but we peaked at over 100 players online, and it’s nice to say that you’ve made an “online RPG.” Maybe we’ll get the chance to revisit that area some time!

Like many others, I’ve ended up spending over $100 during the Steam Holiday Sales, and I fully expect to buy even more stuff before it ends. One of the things I bought was the iD Software Super Pack, because I grew up with Doom and Quake and wanted to give them another go (however, if I want to play Doom I’d rather download zDoom or some of the other more modern implementations).

When Quake 3 Arena was released, almost ten years ago, I was still playing QuakeWorld with my clan “Underscore.” I didn’t really like Q3A, I thought it was slow and the player movement was bulky. I started working on a mod to get some more QW-like flow, which I called “QWFix.” It was a fun experiment, but I had some severe bugs which made it unplayable for some people (Q3A’s movement code was FPS dependant, a fact that caused some controversy when people discovered the “125 FPS sweet spot” a year later or so).

My dedication to the mod led me to another project called Challenge Pro Mode. It was a mod intended to be used by professional Q3A players and was created by a group of people from the Challenge Network (all sites in the network are now either porn sites or spyware search engines). I joined the team as a programmer, and worked mainly on improving the HUD and adding customizable player colors (a feature that seems to be default in the latest patch of Q3A). I also enjoyed making maps to test some ideas.

One of the maps I made was called “Realm of Steel Rats.” I made it during two weeks more or less spending every wake moment in front of the computer. I got severe pains in my shoulder and missed an exam due to that, but it was clearly worth it. The map turned out really well and is still played actively to this day! The map has received a face-lift by Swelt (sorry, but I do not know who that is), so the official version is now called “CPM4a.” You find both the original and the new version at Challenge-TV.

Now… the reason why I’m writing this tl;dr post is because there are a few things I recall that I thought about when I designed the map. These ideas are mainly focused on deathmatch maps, a game mode that has fallen out of fashion over the years, but may still be applicable to other design areas:

Imbalance means Interesting – Maps should have one good and one not so good area. Making all areas too balanced will make gameplay “unstable.” Put several important items relatively close to each other, but it must be possible to break the siege.

Symmetry for teh Loes – Simply avoid symmetry, it’s uninteresting. These days most people are making teamplay maps (CTF, King of the Hill etc), which makes it more important to have balanced maps. To make these maps more varied, rotated symmetry is better than mirrored symmetry.

Important Stuff should be Easy to Get – Place important items, such as powerups, in hot-spot areas that are easy to get to. It allows for much more intense battles. I really don’t like it when people places the Quad or Battlesuit out of reach, such as down in water pools or high up on a pillar etc.

So… I guess the final punch line of this blog post is that I was happy to see that people were still playing my map! I especially enjoyed the description of the new CPM4a map:

CPM4a – Realm of Steel Rats – CPM TDM map Khaile’s original CPM4 ranks amongst the most played custom teamplay maps ever. Popular in both vQ3 and Challenge ProMode, the Realm of Steel Rats has been used in competitions the world over and hosted countless classic showdowns. This CPM4a remix by swelt replaces the shiny sci-fi texture set with a dirtier industrial set, bringing the visual look of the map bang up to date.

/jeb

EDIT: In case you’re wondering why it says “Khaile’s original CPM4,” it’s because “Khaile” was my old nick before I grew tired of people calling me “Kylie”

During the early years of thewreck’s life (yes I know I’m speaking of myself in third person!), he spent most of his time either making games or playing them.

It all stared a time long ago, in the age of the Amstrad. His father had just sold the tape-version in favor of a diskette version! Oh the joy of basic 1.0 – Many text adventures and fake operating systems later thewreck felt ready to take on his first sprites – and on what system you ask?

On the Atari of course! This is where he made his first acquaintance with Clickteam through their game making environment STOS. It came complete with a lovely scripting language and a sprite editor! In it he made many feeble attempts including the legendary ninja game where the shuriken was on the same sprite as the character (what was he thinking really?)…

During the last year I have tried to write a small update on the development of Dawn of Daria every week. This update was posted as the “Monday Dev Update” in the development forum of www.DawnOfDaria.com. The most recent version of the game was released in December 2006, so it has been a while since this update contained any real Dawn of Daria news. Over the year, the readers of the update have become more and more irritated by this, which is sometimes reflected by their replies. I have thus decided to cease with the monday dev updates for a while and only post there when we have relevant Dawn of Daria news to tell.

Dawn of Daria is a dear project to us, and it’s interesting to see how it has affected Oxeye Game Studio and the development of our games. This story goes back to 2001, when I was living in Stockholm and working for Oblivion Entertainment…